Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." [...] --Pierre-Joseph Proudhon |
Illustration:Liberty Leading the People (1831, detail) by Eugène Delacroix.
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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French politician, the founder of Mutualist philosophy, an economist and a libertarian socialist. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist and is among its most influential theorists. He is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He became a member of the French Parliament after the revolution of 1848 whereupon he referred to himself as a federalist.
Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion is that Property is theft!, contained in his first major work, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government, published in 1840. The book's publication attracted the attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with its author. The two influenced each other: they met in Paris while Marx was exiled there. Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded to Proudhon's The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of Philosophy. The dispute became one of the sources of the split between the anarchist and Marxian wings of the International Working Men's Association. Some, such as Edmund Wilson, have contended that Marx's attack on Proudhon had its origin in the latter's defense of Karl Grün, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been preparing translations of Proudhon's work.
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Sexism
Nevertheless, while racism was not overtly part of his political philosophy, Proudhon did publicly express sexist beliefs. In her study of Gustave Courbet, who painted the portrait of Proudhon and His Children (1865) – art historian Linda Nochlin points out that alongside his early articulations of anarchism Proudhon also wrote and published “the most consistent anti-feminist tract of its time, or perhaps, any other,” La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, which “raises all the main issues about woman’s position is society and her sexuality with a paranoid intensity unmatched in any other text.” (Nochlin, Courbet. Thames & Hudson, 2007. p. 220, note 34)
Proudhon's defenses of patriarchy did not go unchallenged in his lifetime; Joseph Déjacque attacked Proudhon's anti-feminism as a contradiction of anarchist principles. Déjacque directed Proudhon "either to 'speak out against man's exploitation of woman' or 'do not describe yourself as an anarchist.'" (Jesse Cohn "Anarchism and gender" in: The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Immanuel Ness (Ed.), 2009)
Bibliography
- Qu'est ce que la propriété? (What is Property?, 1840)
- Warning to Proprietors (1842)
- Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère (The System of Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of Misery, 1846)
- Solution of the Social Problem, (1849)
- Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle (General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 1851)
- Le manuel du spéculateur à la bourse (The Manual of the Stock Exchange Speculator, 1853)
- De la justice dans la révolution et dans l'Eglise (Of Justice in the Revolution and the Church, 1858)
- La Guerre et la Paix (War and Peace, 1861)
- Du principe Fédératif (Principle of Federation, 1863)
- De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (Of the Political Capacity of the Working Class, 1865)
- Théorie de la propriété (Theory of Property, 1866)
- Théorie du mouvement constitutionnel (Theory of the Constitutionalist Movement, 1870)
- Du principe de l'art (The Principle of Art, 1875)
- Correspondences (Correspondences, 1875)
On Proudhon
- Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon by Alex Prichard. Routledge. 2013
See also
- Social anarchism
- Individualist anarchism
- Self management
- Socialist economics
- Individualist anarchism in Europe
- Cost the limit of price
